Legendary Collection 3’s Story

September 6th, 2012

In less than a month, you will hold Legendary Collection 3: Yugi’s World in your own hands. LC3 is a fantastic item that we’re very proud of. Today, I’m going to tell you the story of how it came to be.

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In the Beginning…

The very first Legendary Collection (from 2010) was a huge success. It finally gave everyone a chance to get all three of the original (non-effect) Egyptian God Cards, plus other iconic monsters from the original series and reprints of some of the very first booster packs.

People loved it. However, watching the response, I learned some valuable lessons from Legendary Collection. People loved getting the God Cards. People loved getting the trio of Dark Magician, Blue-Eyes, and Red-Eyes. People loved the nostalgia of it all. The one thing people were disappointed in was that their booster packs weren’t always as exciting as the rest of the LC’s contents. Sometimes you’d crack a Mirror Force or an Exodia piece, but sometimes the pack was more of a miss. After all, these packs were from a different time. Duelists wanted everything in that box, across the board, to be, well, LEGENDARY!

Legendary Collection was a fantastic release. But I knew that we could do better.

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A New Idea…

Fortunately, if injecting some extra awesome into the booster packs was what we needed, I had the perfect solution sitting in a shoebox on my Magic Shelf of Ideas. One of the things I had been kicking around for a while was a brand new kind of booster pack that I called the Mega-Pack. Instead of a chance at a Super, Ultra, or Secret Rare in every pack, a Mega Pack would have ALL THREE, plus a normal Rare and some common cards.

I was originally planning to use the Mega-Pack idea in our annual holiday Collectible Tins. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the best place for the Mega-Packs was someplace where regular boosters just weren’t fitting quite right. And that’s when Legendary Collection 2 really started to come together in my head.

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GX’s Challenges

As I fiddled with the idea of a Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Legendary Collection, another problem I had was that I couldn’t pinpoint six iconic booster releases from the GX era, without leaving something important out. Legendary Collection 1 was easy – the obvious choices were the first 4 releases (from the first year of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG), Dark Crisis (Guardian monsters, Shinato, the Chess Archfiends, and cards still used today like Final Countdown and Skill Drain), and Invasion of Chaos (no explanation required…).

But for GX, the iconic cards were very evenly spread out among the releases. The top candidates were Cybernetic Revolution (Cyber Dragon, etc.) and Shadow of Infinity (Sacred Beasts). Phantom Darkness and Light of Destruction also made sense, although they were more famous for their non-TV cards, and had also been reprinted in Twilight Edition.

That still gave us only four, though. You could add The Lost Millennium since it was the first GX booster, but it didn’t have all that many GX cards. And even then we still need a sixth booster. And what about all those HERO monsters we skipped over by leaving out sets like Elemental Energy and Enemy of Justice?

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Chronicling The Duel Academy Years

And then it hit me. Why reprint booster sets in their original forms at all? By taking the Mega-Pack idea away from the tins and introducing it in Legendary Collection, we improved the LC product on many levels:

1. Your pulls became more systematic. You had six boosters pulling from the same card pool, rather than 1 shot each at 6 different pools like in LC1. Pack pulls were less swingy, more uniform.

2. It massively increased the number of foils per box, from 6-12 (LC1) to 33 (LC2). LC2 became something you just couldn’t afford to miss.

3. It let us pull from the entire GX era. If we picked only specific original boosters, some of Jaden’s iconic HERO monsters would have been left out. With Mega-Packs, we could build a custom-made 266 card mega-set built specifically for this release.

4. Most important of all, we added that extra element of awesome that was missing for some people from LC1’s booster packs.

Even with all of that, there were skeptics! After all, LC2 had no Egyptian God Cards, some said. But Legendary Collection 2: The Duel Academy Years knocked the ball right out of the park, selling out of most stores within 48 hours of hitting the shelf!

LC2 was such a huge hit that we had to come out with the Ra Yellow Mega-Pack afterwards, to satisfy demand for LC2 Mega-Packs. And then, after that, we had to come out with the Ra Yellow Mega-Pack Special Edition, to satisfy demand for the Ra Yellow Mega-Packs.

<whew>

So that brought me to a brand new question: Now what?

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Birth of Legendary Collection 3

Just as we learned from Legendary Collection 1, we also learned from Legendary Collection 2. One thing, in particular, caught me by surprise…

We got a LOT of stories from Duelists in their mid- and late-teens, who remembered watching Jaden’s adventures on Yu-Gi-Oh! GX when they were kids. But they were too young at the time to have very many cards. Legendary Collection 2 was the first chance for many of them to finally own the monsters, spells, and traps that they had loved when they were younger.

It was a good reminder that Legendary Collection, above all things, is a celebration. It’s a celebration of the joy everyone felt watching the Yu-Gi-Oh! series on TV, years ago. They key thing is nostalgia.

And in order to have nostalgia, time has to pass. Which brings us to 5D’s. Not enough time had passed since the final episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s. In other words: It’s too soon for a 5D’s Legendary Collection.

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OK, so Legendary Collection: 5D’s is out. At least for this year. What do we do instead?

That’s simple.

We go back to the original series. And this time… this time, we do it better. We take all the lessons we learned from Legendary Collection and Legendary Collection 2: The Duel Academy Years, and we make Legendary Collection 3: Yugi’s World the best that it can be:

Mega-Packs custom-tailored to capture the essence of Yugi’s World, including many of his greatest foes. A 306-card mega-set – the biggest booster set in history!

Instead of the 3-ring binder, something new: a fold-up, hard-surface Game Board.

And, most important, a brand new card. A card that Duelists have been begging us to release for eight years: The Seal of Orichalcos!